Humanae Vitae – Fourty Years after

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Fr. Curran & fellow theologian Dan Maguire at the time the encyclical came out, drew a popular “Statement of Dissent” and many priests sign that document with him. It is likely that this is the single most ignored and derided papal document of all time.

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I just finished a book by Walter Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome. It was a sci-fi book about the sanctity of life. Walter Percy is a Catholic author. The protagonist is a psychiatrist with residual Catholic tendencies who notices something strange in his patients –a syndrome — that makes them numb to normal horrors, makes them less inhibited, makes them more likely to think like idiot savants (human calculators), less likely to think metaphorically (one might say, sacramentally, or even poeticaly). The syndrome looks suspiciously like modernism. His colleagues, also in the mental health business, don’t believe a person is really a person before 18 months old, and can be terminated because of any imperfection, and believe that euthanasia is the most humane thing for the elderly.

Thanatos was a Greek personification of death. It turned out that the syndrome was not accidental, but experimental.

It was a good book to read this month in light of this anniversary. I read it because there was an interesting passage concerning sacraments in the last chapter. The main character’s wife was Presbyterian, then Episcopalian, then pentecostal, and he’s describing her:
“She is herself a little holy spirit hooked up to a lusty body. In her case spirit has nothing to do with body. Each goes its own way. Even when she was a Presbyterian and I was a Catholic, I remember that she was horrified by the Eucharist: Eating the body of Christ. That’s pagan and barbaric, she said. What she meant and what horrified her was the mixing up of body and spirit, Catholic trafficking in bread, wine, oil, salt, water, body, blood, spit — things. What does the Holy Spirit need with things? Body does body things. Spirit does spirit things.”

The syndrome removed spirit from body. It made it so lives were just bodies, just cogs in the big machine from the moment of conception, feeling no real feelings, becoming animal-like in their appetites and their ability to process the world. If that were the case, babies could be killed easily if they weren’t going to be productive, if they were going to be inconvenient, if the brute, simple pleasure of the parent was going to be threatened, then there is no real reason to object to “mercy” killing.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI -Crest

St. Brendan the Navigator

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Patron Saint of CCC's

You’re St. Melito of Sardis!

You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins.

Historian Moto

"It has been very well observed that there is no such thing as an impartial historian. Every man who sets out to trace the development of life, whether in politics, religion, or art, is bound to do so with some theory in his mind... The historian, or the theologian, who is most nearly impartial is not he who has no view, but he who is aware of other views, and can give them due consideration." -- Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, May 1907, paper read before the Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

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Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is
himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part
to master all the tides of the world, but to do what
is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are
set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so
that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Part Three of the Lord of the
Rings,160
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